Blue Spaces, Why Time Spent Near Water Is The Secret Of Happiness
'Blue spaces: why time spent near water is the secret of happiness.' Health & wellbeing. Coastal environments have been shown to improve our health, body & mind. So should doctors start issuing nature-based prescriptions? The Guardian, 11/4/19.
After her mothers sudden death, Catherine Kelly felt the call of the sea. She was in her 20s and had been working as a geographer in London away from her native Ireland. She spent a year in Dublin with her family, then accepted an academic position on the west coast, near Westport in County Mayo. I thought: I need to go and get my head cleared in this place, to be blown away by the wind and nature.
Kelly bought a little house in a remote area and surfed, swam and walked a three-mile-long beach twice a day. I guess the five or six years that I spent there on the wild Atlantic coast just healed me, really. She didnt understand why that might be until some years later, when she started to see scientific literature that proved what she had long felt intuitively to be true: that she felt much better by the sea. For the past eight years, Kelly has been based in Brighton, researching outdoor wellbeing and the therapeutic effects of nature particularly of water.
In recent years, stressed-out urbanites have been seeking refuge in green spaces, for which the proven positive impacts on physical and mental health are often cited in arguments for more inner-city parks and accessible woodlands. The benefits of blue space the sea and coastline, but also rivers, lakes, canals, waterfalls, even fountains are less well publicised, yet the science has been consistent for at least a decade: being by water is good for body and mind.
Proximity to water especially the sea is associated with many positive measures of physical and mental wellbeing, from higher levels of vitamin D to better social relations. Many of the processes are exactly the same as with green space with some added benefits, says Dr Mathew White, a senior lecturer at the University of Exeter and an environmental psychologist with BlueHealth, a programme researching the health and wellbeing benefits of blue space across 18 (mostly European) countries...
More, https://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2019/nov/03/blue-space-living-near-water-good-secret-of-happiness
~ Time for a Blue New Deal to revitalize our water spaces.
pandr32
(11,594 posts)N_E_1 for Tennis
(9,754 posts)on the water. We kayak during the good weather, living in Michigan thats mostly when theres no ice blocking our way. Haha. Its always therapeutic.
Humans started most of their existence living close to coastlines.Water was the source of life, it gave people most everything they needed survive. Its no wonder its great to get back. There are a lot of landlocked people not close to a shoreline.
appalachiablue
(41,153 posts)Backseat Driver
(4,394 posts)Runningdawg
(4,522 posts)I prefer the desolation of the high desert. To each their own.
Arthur_Frain
(1,854 posts)Im a high alpine guy.
Lars39
(26,109 posts)Nature heals.
appalachiablue
(41,153 posts)BigmanPigman
(51,613 posts)"Man was born from the sea, and shall return to the sea".
Brother Buzz
(36,448 posts)I grew up in a tidal area and loves all aspects of the tide; floods, ebbs, and slack water. Things were always changing, and there was ALWAYS something cool to witness.
patphil
(6,186 posts)There is a natural affinity to it.
Also it harks back to our time in the womb.
Nitram
(22,825 posts)I hike through gorgeous natural surroundings to prominent outlooks in the Blue Ridge mountains that let me gaze into infinity across miles of uninhabited forested land here in Virginia.